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Retired Dreams discusses Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro,Brazil's greatest novel and one of the little-recognized masterpieces of allthe America's. Published precisely at the turn of the century, Dom Casmurro canbe considered a literary milestone, giving the last word on the tradition ofthe realistic bourgeois novel and opening the door to the preoccupations ofcontemporary writers. The book is pervaded by a sense of change; its narrator/protagonistseems caught between a primitive mentality of archetype and a consciousness ofthe transitory modern world.

Retired Dreams exploresthis tension. Dixon identifies the quest myth, highly displaced, as theunderlying narrative model and the shaper of the narrator's thinking. Hedevotes separate chapters to the function of time, to the rebirth motif, therole of matriarchy and patriarchy, the voyage motif and woman as anima, andsymbols and primitivism. Particular attention is given to the role of the majortropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) as devices permitting boththe connection and the distancing between the tradition of heroic discourse andthe domesticated, unheroic reality of the novel's characters. Through thisrhetorical-mythic lens, the book examines many of the factors that havecontinued to fascinate both general readers and critics - the work's ambiguousplot and characterization its problematic ideology its self-conscious artistryand its cosmic vision.